THE U. S. SIGNAL CORPS 



THE Alaskan telegraph system 

 has been completed by the U. S. 

 Signal Corps. It is now possible 

 to send messages by wire to Valdes, Fort 

 Michael, and to stations along the Yukon 

 River. At present these messages must 

 pass over Canadian lines to the inter- 

 national boundary near Fort Egbert, 

 whence they are carried by the U. S. 

 military lines to their Alaskan desti- 

 nation. A cable has been laid from 

 Sitka to Juneau and up the Lynn Canal 

 to Skagway, connecting by way of 

 White Pass with the Canadian tele- 

 graph line, and bringing these impor- 

 tant points into instant communication 

 with Washington and London. 



Few realize the difficulties that have 

 been overcome in building this network 

 of 1,740 miles of wire. Most of the 

 land lines were put in during the best 

 working season, November to Febru- 

 ary. The mean temperature for these 

 four months was two degrees below 

 zero. Sometimes it was so cold that 

 the mercury froze solid after it had gone 

 as low as 61 degrees below zero. Gen. 

 A. W. Greely, U. S. A., in his last re- 

 port as Chief Signal Officer, says of the 

 work: 



" It is impossible to adequately set forth 

 the tremendous difficulties under which 

 Alaskan military telegraph lines have 

 been constructed and maintained. In 

 general, it is to be premised that not 20 

 miles of constructed wagon road exists 

 in the country traversed. As a rule, all 

 material has been sledded into the in- 

 terior in midwinter or carried by pack 

 animals over the roughest imaginable 

 trails. Conditions were so difficult that 

 some coils of wire were carried 145 miles 

 by pack. The magnitude of the work 

 may be inferred by the statement that 

 from Fort Egbert alone, between No- 

 vember 20, 1902, and June 30, 1903, no 

 less than 220 tons of supplies and ma- 

 terial were sledded or packed into the 



interior, it being impossible to move a 

 ton b3' wagon. 



" The construction parties, consisting 

 almost entirely of enlisted men of the 

 Signal Corps and of the line of the Army, 

 worked steadily the entire winter, al- 

 though the conditions under which field 

 work was done were of the most hazard- 

 ous and appalling character. As an 

 illustration may be mentioned the fact 

 that from November 1 to the end of the 

 winter, by official reports, 60 feet and 1 1 

 inches of snow fell at Fort Liscum, ad- 

 joining the Copper River Valley. 



"In the interior, while the snowfall 

 was very much less, being only 4 feet 4 

 inches at Egbert, yet continued and 

 terrible cold made camp life and con- 

 struction work almost insupportable. 

 The mean temperature at Fort Egbert 

 from November to February, inclusive, 

 a period of four months, was 2° below 

 zero. There were prolonged periods of 

 extreme low temperature, when the 

 mercury remained frozen, the minimum 

 of 6i° below zero occurring in January. 

 While the past winter is believed to 

 have been the most severe in Alaska for 

 many years, yet such was the resource- 

 fulness and endurance of the American 

 soldier that the work of construction in 

 the valley of the Tanana was carried 

 on the entire winter without loss of life 

 and with only one serious case of freez- 

 ing. 



' ' The cold and snow of the winter 

 were, strangely enough, more favorable 

 to completing the system than were the 

 morasses and fires of summer. The final 

 completion of the telegraph system was 

 made just as an extensive forest fire de- 

 vastated the upper valley of the Tanana, 

 burning thousands of square miles of 

 valuable timber and destro3-ing more 

 than 100 miles of telegraph line. The 

 damage was the more serious in that the 

 100 miles of line destroyed were burnt 

 out not as a whole section, but at vari- 



